It's like PowerToys for language geeks!

There are times that a beta comes out that I can really get behind.

Like earlier today while I toiled away on my slides for that WEX presentation and then later helped my favorite pirate and strange Josh/Gretchen/Michael triangle member Gretchen Ledgard do some random gratis pimping on JobsBlog, and then a bunch of other meetings, I never got to look at email during the day....

But when I finally did get to look at email, and noticed that early while I was doing those last-minute slide revisions, Mike Hedley had pointed me at the Visual Studio International Pack 1.0 Beta1 release, by the Developer International group, which is available in five languages! Downloads here:

• English
• Japanese
• Korean
• Traditional Chinese
• Simplified Chinese

The overview of the project:

The Visual Studio International Pack contains a set of class libraries designed for .NET developers to create world-ready applications. The Visual Studio International Pack 1.0 release provides the following seven components to enhance the globalization features provided by .NET Framework.

• East Asia Numeric Formatting Library - Format numeric data into Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean capital style string.
• Japanese Kana Conversion Library - Convert one Kana character set to another character representation in Japanese.
• Japanese Text Alignment Library - Enable applications to render strings in Japanese-specific alignment style.
• Japanese Yomi Auto-Completion Library - Provide class library and TextBox control sample that support Japanese IME-aware auto-complete.
• Korean Auto Complete TextBox Control - Provide TextBox control that supports auto-complete and the Intellisense feature with Korean input.
• Simplified Chinese Pin-Yin Conversion Library - Retrieve Simplified Chinese characters' properties such as polyphone, homophone, Pinyin or number of strokes.
• Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese Conversion Library and Add-In Tool - Convert text in Traditional Chinese into Simplified Chinese or vice versa. This component also includes an add-in tool to the in VS IDE that can convert between Simplified and Traditional Chinese resource files.

I will probably be talking more about these features as I dig in here. But in any case this is definitely a beta I can get behind. :-)

And now I am on my way out the door, but I'll check later for comments and such....

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